The Betrayed
by yougenkyou
Summary: /chained and enslaved, what once was light turned to blackness/. A tribute of sorts to the Falmer. Very dark & depressing with mentions of torture and other unpleasantness.


First Skyrim fic…thing…

Written because ow all my feels for the Falmer. The poem in the fic is from a book you can get in the Dawnguard DLC (so it is not written by me!) and it was my main inspiration. This is also based on everything you find out about how the Falmer became what they are, so it might be sort of spoiler-ish for Dawnguard. This is all just speculative of course. I also have no idea if Engwe (name of the author of the poem) is a female or male name, but I went with female because that's the way it sounded to me. I could be entirely wrong though.

Anyway.

Warnings for mentions of torture and other unpleasant shit.

* * *

It was warm. Suffocatingly so. And cramped. Engwe could barely move an inch where she was sitting, packed tight into the room with her kinsmen. The stone walls and floor looked like they should be cold, but the neverending steam from the machinery all around made everything unbearably hot.

She heard whimpers and groans, the crying of women, men and children alike. Her kinsmen. People she had lived next door to, people she had gone into hiding with. They'd once taken comfort in being together, but now everyone seemed too consumed by their own suffering. Engwe was no different in that regard.

In the corners of the room stood those horrid guardian spheres. They were so still one might think they were not alive, but Engwe knew better.

She remembered when they had first arrived here—a large group of survivors; mostly children, women, the young, the weak and the feeble—looking for refugee. When the Dwemer had told what they wanted in return for letting them stay some of the stronger had refused and made a run for it. That was when the guardian spheres came to life, shooting projectiles that hit the fleeing targets.

Engwe's brother had been one of them. She had been only moments from following him, but when he got hit she had frozen to the spot—overcome by shock and terror. He had called out her name before the projectile hit the back of his head and then he had fallen into a pool of his own blood, dead before he touched the ground. After that no one else tried to run.

Engwe knew a little Dwemeri—enough to understand the context of simple conversations, but not enough to hold a lengthy conversation in it, and when they'd been ushered into different rooms with only each other and the guardian spheres as company, she was certain she had heard one of the Dwemer call the rooms the 'slave pens'.

It made her wish that she could have followed her brother into death. Surely that would be better than to become a blind slave to these cruel people?

Hours after that they had been fed. Engwe and several others had refused to eat, though. Only the weakest and most hungry of them could not resist and ended up convulsing and bleeding from their eyes. A few of them died and those that didn't were left with eyes so swollen that they could not see anything at all through them.

Engwe had understood then, that this was how the Dwemer intended on taking their sight away.

She had been right, she found, when the Dwemer returned to forcefeed the ones who had refused. They were given smaller doses than the others, but it still caused convulsions in some. Engwe had felt an excrutiating pain in her eyes and when she went to wipe away what she thought was tears her hands were stained red by the blood running down her cheeks.

She didn't know how long ago that was, but her eyes had begun to swell. She knew that soon her vision would be gone completely. Soon she would never see the light again; not the bright light from the sun, nor the radiant light of Auri-El himself. She remembered when she had journeyed on the Pilgrim's Path in order to prove her faith and her loyalty to Auri-El. She had been half-crazed from exhaustion, starvation and sleep deprivation when she finally reached the Inner Sanctum, but what she remembered the strongest was the feeling of contentment, of relief and pleasant warmth that had filled her when she had gazed upon the statue of her god.

Here her prayers did not seem to reach him. They were so deep in the darkness that not even Auri-El could hear his people call out for his aid, for his light to touch upon them again.

She had lost her mother to an illness before the war had started, she had lost her father to the war, she had lost her brother to the Dwemer's cruelty and now she had lost her god to the darkness. She had no one.

A thought struck her then. The Dwemer had taken everything of value that they had carried with them when they arrived, but they had let Engwe keep two things—an empty notebook with Auri-El's symbol on it and a piece of charcoal.

She had always liked to write poems and had filled notebook after notebook with them. Her poems were about Auri-El, about the snowy forests she had used to go hunting with her brother in, they were about her family, about the beauty of their land, about love and hope. She had got her last notebook just as the war had started to take a turn for the worse for her people and they had been forced to go into hiding.

She hadn't written in it because hope had been lost by then; their father was dead and so was the Snow Prince. There had been nothing beautiful left to write about. Even less so now, but Engwe couldn't help but to see the fact that she had been allowed to keep these things as a sign. A sign that she had to write something, to tell the world of their sufferings. Maybe one day, when she was long gone and the Snow Elves were free from their bonds of slavery and suffering someone would find her notes and understand what they had been through.

With shaking fingers she began to write;

_and when the snow prince fell to ground,  
the ice eleves divided above and below._

now vanquished and brutally bound,  
one moment had shattered all they did know.

the once cool wind on their skin,  
now replaced with the heat of the flame.

and a pride once felt deep within,  
forgotten along with their name.

torn from their home of ice and frost,  
thrown into the pitch black dread of night.

living in fear as their minds become lost,  
as their eyes begin dimming the light.

chained and enslaved,  
what once was light turned to blackness.

alone and betrayed,  
sinking deeper into madness.

Tears dropped down on the pages and then the notebook fell out of her hands. The last thing she saw was her brother, smiling at her, bathed in the radiant light of Auri-El and then her vision went dark and she saw nothing more.


End file.
